The modern North American and Australasian usage, referring toEast andSoutheast Asians collectively, seems to be a shortened form of "Asian American", a term whose origins activists and academics trace back to 1968 andUniversity of California, Berkeley (UCLA) studentsYuji Ichioka andEmma Gee, who, inspired by the Black Power Movement and the protests against the Vietnam War, founded the "Asian American Political Alliance" as a way to uniteJapanese,Chinese, andFilipino American students on campus. It replaced the term "Mongoloid", but still continued the racial grouping of "Mongoloid".
The usage in Britain and some of its former colonies such as South Africa, Kenya and Uganda, stems fromSouth Asians historically forming the bulk of immigrants from the continent of Asia to these places.
In the rest of the Anglosphere, the word "Asian" is sometimes, albeit less frequently, used to refer toSouth Asians andCentral Asians, but rarely (if ever) toNear Easterners.
Hate crimes and attacks onAsians have captured the local news and the national attention since 2020, producing a stream of content that showed innocent people being attacked and belittled in never-ending variations on the same violent theme.
1972 August 12,Idi Amin Dada,Speeches by His Excellency the President General Idi Amin Dada, Message to the Nation on 12th/13th August, 1972, Address to Disrict Representatives, 29th August, 1972, Mid-night Address to the Nation, 17th December, 1972[2], Entebbe, Uganda: Government printer:
We call upon you to be ready to take over from the non-citizens who are leaving the country. As you are aware, I, on Wednesday the 9th August, 1972, signed a Decree revoking with effect from that date, all entry permits and certificates of residence which had been granted to British citizens ofAsian origin and the nationals of India, Pakistan and Bangla Desh. They were, however, permitted to stay in Uganda for a period of 90 days from that day [...]
It is not true thatAsians were inadaptable in East Africa. Nearly all Indian men learned to speak English, and, by the second generation, both sexes had become fluently Anglophone, while continuing to use their native tongue (mostly Gujarati, Cutchi, Punjabi or Hindustani). Most Indians also learned the upland Swahili pidgin which is the trade language of East Africa; while few spoke the “correct” coastal Swahili, their fluency in “kitchen Swahili” was often superior to that of the Europeans. The more rural Indian shopkeepers did indeed become somewhat Africanized, while the urban Indian became more Anglicized.
1987 May, Paul Oliver, “Movie Mahal: Indian cinema on ITV Channel 4”, inPopular Music,→DOI, page215:
If radio and television programmes are anything to go by,Asians in Britain get up early on a Sunday.
The American usage of "Asian" (East, Southeast, sometimes South Asian) is internationally used outside of English (e.g. in Turkish, German, Swedish, Korean, French, etc.).
2015 June 4, Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, “The beauty contest winner making Japan look at itself”, inBBC[4]:
There are white, black,Asian and Chinese Britons
2021 March 15, Jessie Yeung, “These Asian countries are giving dual citizens an ultimatum on nationality – and loyalty”, inCNN[5]:
And someAsian countries are tightening their immigration laws. Japan reinforced its strict stance in January when a court upheld the country’s ban against dual citizenship, rejecting a lawsuit filed by Japanese citizens living in Europe.
